


Supercut

by SecretReyloTrash (BadOldWest)



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Alternate Universe - Demons, Alternate Universe - Shipwrecked, Cuddling & Snuggling, Cunnilingus, Drabble Collection, Edging, F/M, Forbidden Love, Hurt/Comfort, Jedi Rey, Married Sex, Pining, Senator Ben Solo, Smut, Spanking, Stranded on an Island, Switches, Tumblr Prompts, demon!rey, previously posted on tumblr, senator/jedi au, tempest inspired au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-08
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-07-27 23:17:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 16,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16229357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/SecretReyloTrash
Summary: I need to go home,” she pleads, and his eyes soften.“When I’m done with you,” he promises imperiously, catching her arm as she tries to push past him. “I give you my word.”“I don’t want your help,” she bends to try to extract her arm from his grasp. He merely folds her into his front, his shoulders at his chest, looming over her, in her ear.“But you need it. Badly.”He nuzzles her hair out of the way of her ear and lets his lips brush the back of it. It’s like he’s easing his voice between her lungs.[tumblr prompts from secretreylotrash]





	1. au:The Tempest

**Author's Note:**

> prompt: "This is our most desperate hour."

“Call for help.”

“It’s being handled.”

 _“Ben,”_  She stands on her toes to look at the horizon. As though that would help her, with the cliffs leering overhead. Nothing but ocean and rock for miles. And him.

He just stands there, so clearly trying to hide a smug smile.

“You don’t know if there’s more people on board,” she protests weakly as he draws closer. “What if they need help?”

“You’d be much more concerned,” he countered, and he was right. She flew -and by that logic, crashed on this island- perfectly alone. Perfect for him.

Rey tries not to look at the smiling mouth when it draws closer to hers, and pulls away when she remembers this is a desperate situation, she can’t think about the mouth of her enemy when she needs to get off this island. She tries to hold her wild hair out of her face as she scans the shore for any signs of life other than _him._ The wind keeps tossing it in her eyes. 

“Comm for…” 

Would he call the First Order? Would he be merciful? Or would he maroon her here, without contact, without help, out of pure spite?

Her skirt whips around her legs from the wind around them, and he watches the reveal of her ankles with calm fascination. He’s maybe never seen this much of her legs.  

“You’re dressed like a lady, for once.”

She stalks away to see if there’s anything on the water that can come get her at shore. There’s not. “A wedding.”

“A happy occasion. I wonder if those celebrating would even think to miss you, in their bliss.”

A dagger of an insult, for her to be forgotten and left. Abandoned. Even he knows to draw closer after saying it, as if to comfort his own wound. 

A flower slides free of the half-knot at the back of her skull. He catches the white blossom and examines it in his gloved hand. 

“I need to go home,” she pleads, and his eyes soften.

“When I’m done with you,” he promises imperiously, catching her arm as she tries to push past him. “I give you my word.”

“I don’t want your help,” she bends to try to extract her arm from his grasp. He merely folds her into his front, his shoulders at his chest, looming over her, in her ear.

“But you need it. Badly.”

He nuzzles her hair out of the way of her ear and lets his lips brush the back of it. It’s like he’s easing his voice between her lungs. 

She lets out a hopeless sound, struggling in his hold only for a minute until she slackens. There’s something about how she gives up that makes him want to tease her into struggling more. 

“What planet were the bride and groom from?”

“Bride and  _bride,”_  she snaps at him, swallowing when his lips brush her neck, unfazed. “They’re both from Naboo.”

He lets a smile take over. His arms are tight around her waist.

“You caught the bouquet, didn’t you?”

Her head shakes.

“Stop.”

“You must have.”

He has contained her with a bend at the waist of his large body. Bent over her, she can only accept the weight. She might be cuddling into it.

“I didn’t even try.”

“But you did.”

She sighs, easing against his body. “What are you going to do?”

He picks her up, and she, in her wet, shredded gown and dying flowers falling from her hair, yelps in surprise as he carries her across the sand. 

“Whatever you beg me to do,” he promises, keeping her close to his body, “and then I’ll call a signal to wherever you want to go. On my word.”

“I beg you to put me down.”

His eyes are cool, but amused, when he looks at her angry face.

“Beg.”

“Please,” she hisses, then takes a deep breath. Speaks more clearly. “Please. Ben. Put me down.”

She touches his cheek at her request, drawing his eyes to hers. This inspires a grunt and for the smile to fall from his lips. He stops walking. 

“Ben, please put me down. I want you to put me down.”

He does. She straightens up when the sand is under her feet again. Scrambles away. there’s a few frantic breaths as she watches the waves crack against distant rocks. Turns back. Takes a few tentative steps back towards him. 

“Take off your gloves,” her tone is more compelling, curious, and even a little wanting. “For me. Please.” 

He complies again.

She wets her lips, tasting salt. The wind now blows her hair back, out of her face. She watches it ruffle his around his intense features. 

 _“Kneel,”_  she blurts out. “Please. I want you to kneel so badly.”

A third time, he proves his word. His knees cave craters into the sand, and he just looks up at her, waiting. 

Her hands ball into fists. The skirt dances around her legs. He watches her, the skin it reveals, but also her eyes. It’s nothing but sand and ocean and rock for miles. A commlink now would barely make the difference of time to be rescued than a commlink in hours. She had no one to dance with at this wedding. No one to meet her eyes when the bouquet filled her hands. No one to help her off this island. Save for him.

He did not leave her on this shore, surely to die. Even if she was his enemy.

“Do with me what you want, and then call for help,” she licks her lips again, her hands fisting in her skirt, drawing it up her legs as he groans and starts to crawl towards her. 

“Please. Please.  _Please.”_


	2. au: [senator/jedi]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "I've loved you always."

_“But you have to know that already.”_

Rey stares at her hands. It’s just been all this time. That’s no small feat, if he isn’t lying.

All this time and he hasn’t said a word until now. 

“You can’t mean that,” Rey barely looks up from her food. A brief meeting, with her Senator friend. A contact, in the senate, leftover from when she was assigned his bodyguard when he was investigating some outer rim child labor conspiracy  _years_ ago. “We met a long time ago.”

They’re too different. He’s drinking wine; she’s not allowed. He’s picking at his food; she’s devouring. He’s paying; pretending he needs her expertise in history to sort out some commemorative speech. That this is a favor on both sides. And not one happy dinner of many, leeching food off of each other’s plates and laughing as he gets tipsy and teases her. 

A hand cups his own face as his elbow props itself on the table between them. Fingers absently, self-consciously, touch the ends of his hair, growing more silver every day. Striking, on him,  _dapper,_  but a constant source of vanity for his evidenced age. 

“You would have run the other way,” he smiles into his mug of kaff, knowing that’s her first instinct even now. “I didn’t want to lose you.”

“I hope that flattery works as well on your political opponents.”

He shakes his head. 

“Doesn’t work on you, either. Never did.”

She does laugh, but it’s nervous. It is a laugh followed by a pregnant pause, as if to see if this is over. Her expression can only be described as a peek at if he’s going to let this go.

He never has.

“Ben,” she says quietly,  _“we can’t.”_

Imagine if they  _could,_  and she would have to think of all the time they had wasted pretending. 

His hand covers hers. Even then she flinches, the feelings she’s not supposed to feel crashing like a wave breaking against the cliffs. She holds her breath at the feel of his skin as he squeezes. Her eyes flicker to other tables, to see if this Senator and his Jedi are caught touching like the lovers they could never be.

His eyes are gentle on hers. His sensitivity is untrained, but accurate as ever. He may have chosen a different path but he is the only opponent she knows she could never best, the Force flowing honest and clear between them.

“I know,” he tells her, not exactly talking about what she’s talking about. Instead something far more dangerous, something she did not say out loud. He leans back, motioning for her to return to her soup.  _“I know.”_


	3. modern au: taking turns

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: "You will suffer as I have suffered"

“This isn’t very funny.”

“Hmm,” he agrees, but the horrible smile is still on his face. He mouths playfully at her inner thigh. “Not very.”

He’s painfully casual, despite the heavy-duty capture and restraints tying her to the bed. She should never have taken it this far; running outside the minute the last bite of dinner was finished on the night of  _his turn;_  making things interesting could go very wrong when she wasn’t the one in control, and him carrying her bridal-style home after chasing her down in the woods surrounding the house had gotten some adrenaline going she isn’t sure he needs an excess of. Badly thought out, on her part. 

And considering  _her_  turn this week, Ben’s not going to go easy on her. 

She in turn, is forcibly casual, even when his head dips lower to suck the taut skin of her inner thigh into his mouth, making a wet pop when he releases and the flush of a red mark coloring her. 

“Why did you run?”

 _Because it’s all a game,_  she wants to surrender immediately, so he’ll laugh. Both breaking character. But his eyes pin her, reminding her she has to play, and there’s one word to stop the game that he’ll hear and no others. He’ll just effortlessly turn it into dry banter, swiping his fingers through her wet core and murmuring  _does this look like a game to you?_

“Because of a look you gave me.”

“I was perfectly fucking civil during dinner. Am I nothing but your adoring husband?”

The word, even at her toughest, always makes her shiver. He knows this. Watches her fight back the emotional response of the abandoned kid that she was have this man lean over her and declare himself hers in some kind of unbreakable way. It aches. He’s really, really going to ruin her tonight. 

She may deserve it.

“Not now,” she whispers, eyes on the ceiling. He chuckles, stroking up and down her legs. 

“What look, Rey, made me have to drag you out of the mud and leaves back to the house?”

She shakes her head until he dips his head between her thighs. They start to quiver as he licks, tentatively, teasing. 

“When it was my turn,” she blurts out, pulling against the restraints. He lifts his head away from her center. Cocks an eyebrow. “There was a look…towards the end, before I let you go, where I sincerely thought you’d kill me.”

He shakes his head, but there’s pleasure in his eyes. Something about him, even now, enjoys referencing his masochistic tendencies when he tops her. As if to say;  _here’s what I survived. What I liked. I’ll do the same to you._

If anything it makes him seem stronger, more intimidating.

His limits don’t always read as a threat, but the hours of her sadistically riding, sucking, and fingering him were not something she could handle. Sitting on his face as he cried out in pleasure, his thick red cock dripping, begging for release. She was so high and mighty then, denying him. Now, she is tied up and faces his turn.

“Just over you edging me?”

As if that was just it. There was a point where she refused his begging where she saw it written all over his face. She would suffer for this when it was his turn.

Taking turns already seems like a childish game, but it restores order between them. It’s been that way since before they were married. Balance. They can have sex without declaring it Ben or Rey’s turn to dominate, they often do, happily, rolling in the sheets, laughing and interspersing with talk about completely irrelevant things. It is not a necessity for sex; it is a necessity for balance. 

“For quite a long time,” she reminds him, and he shudders and licks her cunt, hungry and broken from his spell of control. Feasting. She watches his shoulders tremble. His groan rumbles through her whole body. There is something so…unhinged, about his turn, that she forgets when she takes what she wants during hers. It makes fear a integral part of his turn, regret, knowing he will remember how she made him suffer. She doesn’t know when this turned into a game of revenge. She didn’t question it when her automatic instinct after dinner was over and he swallowed and leaned back in his seat to look at his wife was to run. Almost knowing that running would make his single-minded thirst to restore balance between them even worse.

But it’s not that bad. It could be over with the sound of one word. 

And she ran so he would catch her.


	4. swu: under my skin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: “You’re intentionally getting under my skin so I threaten to spank you/playfully spank you and now you look like you just got banged against a wall” sex

“I’ve fixed the Falcon before, you know, from the look on your father’s face when I  _bypassed the compressor-”_

“I’ve only been told about that face a thousand times now,” Ben replies dryly, not even looking up from the wires he’s toying with. His lips are slightly parted, as they are when he’s focused on something mechanical. Rey shifts her bare feet, propped on the dash. She’s snacking while he’s working, despite her offers to help, but Ben doesn’t like help when it can interfere with the frantic way he problem-solves, so while he works out kinks, the interruptions…

“They say these dried foods expand in your stomach,” she examines a crispy, papery leaf from the packet she’d been crunching on, “am I going to swell up? What are the nutritional facts for these things?”

“Rey,” his teeth are locked together as he hisses. “I told you to be quiet.”

“Are you  _sure_  you don’t need help?”

An extra pair of hands always seemed in the way to him, but she’s got that smug grin like she’s solved the mechanical problem in her head a dozen times in the span it took him to identify it, in the ship he was taught  _how to fly ships_ in, and his breath evacuates swiftly out his nose in frustration. 

The sound of her chewing was already testing him before this.

“You can help by being quiet.”

“Ben…”

_“Would you like it if I…”_

He shakes his head, burrowing into the open panel. Muttering the rest to himself. 

“Would I like it if what?”

Noisy chewing.  _crunch crunch crunch._

_If I shut you up myself?_

He sees her toes wiggle on the dashboard, and he nearly chokes because he said that out loud. 

“Is that a threat or a pick-up line?”

There’s flecks of green all around her lips, remnants from the chips. He’s trying to focus on the voyage home. They haven’t even taken off yet from visiting his mother’s vacation house. This is hardly the time or place. 

“Rey…”

His tone is both questioning and warning. She laughs, fidgeting. “Didn’t think so.”

She crawls over to the panel, imperiously reaching past him to  _fix_  whatever it is he’s working on. “Now if  _you’ll excuse me-”_

_smack_

She falls forward on her elbows with a choked cry. Ben is breathing heavily behind her. After a moment’s shock, her back arches. This poises a raised brow from Ben. Her ass leans towards him, awaiting his hand again. 

He lets a harsh breath out his nose and strikes again. This time she moans.

“Nothing to say?”

He can feel her biting back a smart-ass reply. He slaps her ass once more to make sure it stays out of her mouth. This time, however, he laughs afterwards, swinging again but more playfully. Her temple is rested to the grated floor, her face serene and a little sheepish. 

“All I have to say is my husband is a very, very good fixer and I’m so lucky to have such a big strong man in my life.”

Her hair is matted against her face and she looks at him like she craves him, and it’s enough to make his stomach knot and for him to forgive the sarcasm. 

There’s time enough, he figures, if she gives him a hint what’s wrong with the engine…

Her pants are around her knees and he thrusts into her on the floor of the cockpit and she mutters something about their sex  _here_  outnumbering all other places…

He rolls his eyes and groans, pulling her back up against his chest so she kneels in front of him, pressed to him. Ben bends and kisses her cheek. 

He strokes a soothing circle against the flesh he’s roughed up, She hums appreciatively, closing her eyes.

His lips find her neck, soothing, apologizing, but she’s the one who rubbed up against his temper at what she knew was the worst time-

This is one of those quick fucks, it has to be, but the attitude of making it part of the long trip home, like a pit stop or a detour to get snacks, seems to make it intense and focused in a way that does a lot for careful-planner Ben. She cums on schedule, he’s got a skill for that. When her muscled thighs are loose from sex and his cum floods her, he goes back to the board. 

“Eat your chips. I’m taking us home.”

She allows him to kiss her lips gently, her own expression melted into adoring at the touch of her husband being bad, or being bad for her husband, or-

_“You two haven’t left yet?”_

They both flinch at his mother’s voice over the comm. Rey groans and pulls up her pants. He reaches past his wife to key in his response.

“No, mother,” his voice is too low and composed, obviously hiding the touch of playful arousal. It’s too obvious though, he has to cover Rey’s mouth to hide her giggles over this fact. “Just some engine trouble.”

“Sure, I can see you two from the balcony. Maybe step one of fixing it is to stop looking for the problem on your wife’s ass.”


	5. swu: ready

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: While arguing, rey accidentally says something too far and ben leaves. she eventually goes out to find him and they make up.

The trick, this time, is  _finding_  him. 

The work he was doing since the war ended at least got him to the point he could make it to a practice room  _before_  eviscerating something. Before then she could just follow the trail of smoke to where he retreated to. But this fight was in the practice room, and Rey didn’t leave him to it, doubling down on her righteous feelings that  _she shouldn’t have to leave,_ so as she kicked a weighted bag back and forth Ben stalked off and left her in her bubble. 

She’s sweated out most of the malice, and the quiet feels cold against her skin when she slumps against the mats on the floor. Serves her for being so territorial; now she has no clue where to look. Ben isn’t an  _outside_  kind of person, she isn’t sure it’s a walk he’s looking for to clear his head, he’s so heavily shielded whenever he goes outside in thick knits she’s not sure if it’s to protect himself or to prepare himself to be out in the open.

She asks around base, but no one has gutted any tech with a lightsaber, no innocent one’s throat bears bruised blood vessels. The mystery of Ben’s rage is scary  _in_  it’s mystery, that she is not trailing it calmly, picking up pieces; that he is a complete person no one is propping up with whispers and damage control. Rey is facing a fight with an equal, something that was an odd feeling after working towards this point with him for so long. This is a new responsibility. No crowding, no supervising with therapeutic murmurs. This time  _she_  crossed that line, after helping Ben drag himself over it, and she sees how murky, how dangerous the other side is from his perspective. 

She presses into their connection,  _cheating,_ she should know where he is like he intrinsically does when she’s upset. Water. Hot water. The rest is closed off to her, protected. 

She goes to their quarters, her hands feeling useless and empty when at this time  _she_  chose rage, he chose quiet meditation in the shower.

His head is tilted down when she walks into the refresher, her hands instinctively going to shed her practice clothes. It’s the wrong entrance to make, but she doesn’t know how to cuddle up to him when this anger passes, because  _she is the one that crossed the line_  and  _she_  hurt  _him._

“I forgot, for a while, that you’re as angry as me.”

He’s poking at her, testing to see if she’ll bite again. Not out of amusement, but self-protection. 

“Well you should never forget that,” she answers dryly, her bare hip resting against the counter as she crosses her arms over her chest. He hasn’t looked at her yet. His wet hair covers his face. 

“I’m not going to make you-” He sighs, his hand splayed out on the wall. Propping himself up. “I wasn’t saying I was going to make you have a baby, soon, or ever. That’s your choice. Just that I like the idea. It makes me happy to think about. Is that so wrong?”

Her heart pulls in her chest, but it’s knocked back by the same fear that sprouted like a plague from her when he brought it up. Not able to look at her, then, just like now. His tone was tentative;  _you know, they say babies born under this year’s star alignment are good luck…_

She isn’t ready now. That’s a hard fact. Inarguable. But she went off in the middle of the practice room, with a rage he’s never seen, about everything but that one fact. 

He interrupted her when she reached the absurdity of  _find someone else who will, why don’t you?_

“I just want us to have a family.” His tone was confused, defensive.  _Why wouldn’t she want the same thing?_

It was the wrong word. The wrong thing to say to  _her._ Instantly this conversation felt like drowning. 

She sneered at him, her own untouched insecurities now awake and writhing like a nest of snakes. “Family? Look what you did to  _your_  family, and tell me why I should trust  _you-_ ”

It is the response of someone who was left to someone who chose to leave, the sides of the line hard to cross, and couldn’t have been until he chose to come back. But there are new aches by choosing to live with each other; new heartbreaks as situations layer themselves, mirror, echo. 

“I think I proved just how ready I am for that conversation,” she slides into the shower next to him. “I…I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he still hasn’t moved towards her, she sees him staring at the water above his head pointedly as he speaks. Prepared for this rejection. 

“I’m sorry for what I said,” she amends, resting her brow between his shoulders. He sighs.

“It’s true.”

 _“Stop,”_  her throat aches from remorse. “Stop. I was wrong.  _I was wrong._  You’re my family, Ben. I can’t lose you.”

He still doesn’t move. 

“You won’t.”

Her arms slide around his waist. “I’m not ready. I don’t want to keep you from what you want-”

“I’m not going to leave you,” he twists around, dumbfounded. “Is that what you think? That I’ll pack up and find someone else just because I want some kids running around? I want  _you,_  Rey, this is just a different level of wanting you.”

It’s her turn to withdraw, her heart in her throat, and he croaks out a miserable sound and  _finally_  reaches for her. 


	6. swu: obligatory cuddle prompt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: reylo snuggles in bed? maybe kylo/ben comforting rey?
> 
> SWU: Ambiguous Timeline, Rey’s training under Luke but Kylo’s also turned.

A hand cups her hip. It’s tentative, for someone so authoritative in all the things he wants; usually demanding, unyielding.

 This is a rare departure from the other side of this bed, after Rey slamming around her things upon entry to their quarters. Tossing aside her staff and kicking off her shoes. Screaming into a pillow. Refusing to put to words her frustration, just curling into bed with her clothes on and hiding under the covers and the edges of her mind causing things around the room to topple over, vibrate, float. 

She hears him wet his lips. He had -understandably, wary of tantrums as the more dramatic of the two- asked what was wrong when she walked in. But it’s nothing different than the usual thing that has her downtrodden; training with Luke is a frustrating process and he tests her because he sees the potential in her. Something Ben would understand better than anyone. But it’s not about understanding. It’s not about  _I’m upset because:_

It’s just being treated like a pathetic idiot for trying. From men who smirked at her attempts to heal, to grow, to find humanity. Something like when he was Kylo. Something like every day since. 

“I don’t know how to help.”

He says it like he needs a hand here, like he’s uncomfortable. Her fury binds her into a tight ball under the blankets, half ready to tell him to fly off and leave her to her rage. 

She doesn’t answer, her eyes boring into the wall at the side of the bed. She hears a sigh, feels a huge body curve behind hers. She grits her teeth when his arms curl around her. 

“Is this,” he seems frustrated for even trying. As annoyed with the galaxy as she feels. “Is this helping? I don’t know what you need.”

He presses into her mind, she forces him out. He tenses, but when he tries to slither away, call the attempt a failure, she yanks him back like a blanket much needed on frosty morning. Her teeth are on edge. The only sound in the room is her erratic breathing. He can tell this much;  _don’t say a kriffing word._

He relaxes back down to cuddle behind her. It’s not as though he knows how to handle this, or at least, what someone does to help when they see someone they care about in this state. He dealt with what she was feeling entirely alone. At least her powers aren’t ripping the room apart anymore. She tenses and un-tenses her spine against his front, feeling out the solid presence behind her. He snuggles close. Buries his face in her hair. 

Curiously, not meaning to prod, she feels for his mind. She finds his own insecurity in his ability to comfort, his desire to know how to  _fix._  His lack of confidence cracks her open, with her walls up, she begins to cry. 

“What?” his hand on her stomach presses her close. “Rey,  _talk to me.”_

She shakes her head with frustrated breath. “It’s not much to talk about. I’m a hopeless trainee. I’m letting down everyone who had faith in me. I should have been left to rot in the desert on Jakku.”

He shakes his head, his thumb circling somewhere against her ribs. “You are trying to control your emotions instead of understanding them. Jedi love their control. But it’s what breeds darkness on both sides.”

“I don’t…want to get philosophical.”

Her tear-stained cheek presses into her pillow. It feels too hot now, her sweaty clothes, the blankets, Ben. 

He kisses the back of her neck. “Alright.”

And he still doesn’t seem to know what to make of her, what to do with her. 

His annoyance has as least waned to something more gentle. She was thrusting him into his least confident role. He could balm his own animosity he called between them, that was his own compulsive control. Irk her until he had to overwhelm her in pleasure and affection to mend the fray between them. Healing through staged battle. He didn’t know how to deal with his need to  _help_ her without killing something. And she hadn’t given the orders yet. He’s ready if she does. 

“What do I do,” he pleads, kissing up her neck. “Tell me.”

She shakes her head, the tears ceasing with a shuddery breath. She has spent years tapering off the length of these bad feelings; nights alone where crying about it is futile. Like she was trying to sand the grief down to something more efficient. It’s why any sneer at her smile is such a trigger; she is smiling because she’s strong, not a weak idiot like she’s treated as. Them believing that it was  _easy,_  putting this on and  _trying every day-_

_“Oh, Rey.”_

She accidentally opened up for him; humiliation fills her as she gasps, tunneling down in her head to try and do damage control.

He manipulates her body to roll into his, her chest to his chest, her breath fully connecting her to him. She doesn’t fight it. Her face buries in his shoulder. “You are not alone.”

 _“That’s what I need,”_  she cuts into his words jaggedly, as soon as he starts to say it she responds with desperate clutches. He stops wavering. He holds her tight, moves his hands across her body to map some kind of assurance that he’s right there, loving her. 

Gently, he weaves a hand in her hair, touches at the fragile bone of her skull. He had a perverse fascination with the things that made her human, as an adversary and a lover. That this is what  _life_  was. Something that could stop with the crush of a skull. It made his dedication to tending her wounds such a power play. That he was brushing up against his greatest fear; that Rey could bleed. 

 _“Who do I have to kill for you?”_  he murmurs against her trembling shoulder; and finally, she laughs. 


	7. modern au: reylo + daddy kink

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: reylo + daddy kink?

“So you’re making me… _guess_ your kink?”

Ben’s face scrunched up, but that was only a flash before he buried his head in his hands. 

“It is…not exactly something you ask for in a way I can…introducing something so…it’s difficult when…”

When he looked up, Rey’s face seemed to have been processing some things he maybe shouldn’t have left vague. He can’t imagine where her head is at.

“It’s not anything  _weird.”_  

His teeth clicked against the edge of his mug, where he looked ready to drown himself in his tea. Rey furrowed a confused brow. 

“Why can’t you just tell me?”

She was always candid, vocal, unashamed. He was rarely any of these things at one time. 

“Because…” he glanced out the window of her kitchen. It was a rainy, lazy Sunday like so many others, her feet rested in his lap as he read the newspaper, exempting the subject matter  _that Rey brought up_  that there was something he kept trying to ask her for and she was running circles around him trying to figure it out. 

_I just feel it when you look at me, sometimes, like you want more, and you can’t say what-_

He growled, low in his throat, a frustrated sound for the words he couldn’t use. He reached forward, a quick lunge that had her jump, and tossed her skirt up in her lap. Her thighs were now bare, exposed to him. She raised her eyebrows at him. He didn’t look at her, a heady blush forming on his cheeks as he reached his hand forward and cupped between her legs, over her panties. 

“Who… _owns_  this?”

Rey merely slid her tea back to prevent her elbow from knocking it over. Not his intended response. “I do.”

“This is the hint,” he shifted his fingers. Her eyes went a little glassy, spreading her legs for him. “Otherwise…forget we had this conversation.”

Rey rolled her eyes. “You. You own this pussy.”

How pedestrian. He’d hoped she had higher expectations. He stroked her enough to make her gasp, then stilled with deadly squeeze. Even holding this about himself back in the past few months of dating, he had gotten to know Rey’s body pretty intimately, well enough to get her on board to try with this.

_“No.”_

She lifted her ass to grind against his grip on her. His fingers insistent on her clothed mound. There was an annoyed sigh, agreeing to try. 

“Master?”

He shook his head. “I don’t  _mind_  that one, but-”

Her tone is slightly incredulous:

_“Daddy?”_

His whole arm jerked. The table gave a miserable whine as it scraped a few feet away from them, knocking the wall from his outburst. There was something in his eyes, so hungry and vacuous, she forgot that this was the pettiest argument they’d ever had. 

 _“Daddy_  owns this pussy,” she tried, her own tone that of disbelief and wonder. “Hmm.”

He was shaking in the chair at the other corner of the table. It was a lot to hear it, especially in such a different context from his fantasies. He withdrew his hand.

“Asking for it, do you get how-”

“Why it’s hard to just come out and say it?” She snorted, patting his hand. This was remedied by a sympathetic sound, then her lips lowering to kiss his knuckles. “Okay. Sorry. I’m caught up.  _This_  is what you needed to hear, those times when you look down at me like you’re begging me to read your mind?”

He nodded, his Adam’s apple working up and down as he swallowed. He was giving her that look right there. 

She lifted herself onto the table, legs hanging down in front of him.

“I didn’t mean to be mean,” her lips quivered as she reached for his face, pawing at it clumsily because he looked away from her, dejected, cranky. “I didn’t want to disappoint you,  _Daddy.”_

She watched him shiver, not trusting she was over her amusement at his expense. Her voice grew honey-sweet. “Let me make it better, please, Daddy.”

And the sound of her sigh and her bare legs and the roll of her hips on the table in front of him was what was the solution to the problem all along; she had to like it too. 

_She had to say it on her own._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one leaned much sillier than sexy, PiO kind of made room for this kink to be fun but it's not my cup of tea. I do like it being a serious secret thing for Ben when he is nothing but a tender and compassionate boyfriend.


	8. swu: [discovering sex toys]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: “You found my sex toys and I teasingly offered to demonstrate them welp here we are”

She’s innocent, but she’s braver than him; and he forgets that when he’s focused on how damn pure she is. That’s how she surprised him. 

Her fists tighten around the length of a leather strap and yank in opposing directions, checking the quality of the bind. It’s strong. She shoots him an amused smile. 

“If I were you, I would hide these better,” Rey shakes the harness, O-Rings and hooks and leather, to demonstrate with necessary visual and unnecessary metallic sounds how  _conspicuous_  the object is, merely hidden under his bed, easily caught on and knocked loose by an unassuming Jedi boot. 

If she was as innocent as he thought, she wouldn’t have teased him so. But she’s braver. Her tone is measured, coaxing, and dry. She unpacks him from the center, his secrets in her hands.

It’s the innocence in her that makes him think she’d just blush, or kick it back under its hiding place, or even vacate the premises. But it’s her bravery that makes her hold out the harness in a careful examination, up to her own body, crafted for a much smaller one that his. It’s bravery on her face, perking up her eyebrows, that looks back at him. 

“So elaborate,” she lifts the leather confines up to the light, twisting it in new angles, “How does one even put this on?”

“You’d do better not to tease,” he whispers, his throat dry, his hands clenched in fists. 

If she wasn’t braver than him, she’d take this as a rejection, look away, stash the incriminating object back in the place he hides it. But she merely smiles.

“How does it confine someone, say, me?”

“I can show you,” he dares, as much bravery on her part inspires some in him. She sits back on his bed, her thin traveling clothes snug against her skin. He could punish her. Cut them off of her. Bind her, leave her there, waiting. But his hands carefully secure the restraints, the leather clipping into place to interlock her hands and hold her twisted arms primly tucked to her chest, her torso manipulated by the leather that wraps around her waist and shoulders and back.

Her back is made to be arched, her hips wide and accommodating. Her eyebrows are raised when he steps back to admire his work. She’s bound by the elaborate instrument, though still inquisitive, still brave. Fully clothed, yet wrapped up for him.

“What do you like about this?” And it’s not horror that makes her ask the question.

His thumbs find her cheeks, examining her face, gently searching for signs of discomfort. He traces slow circles.

“I’m less afraid, when I can do all the work.”

“Afraid?” her lip quirks ironically, like she’s heard something impossible. She wiggles in the restraints. The fact he can be doing  _anything,_  but isn’t, opens him up. Her bravery opens him up.

He crouches down, bearing an equal level to their eyes that shows her a lot more than he had planned. He forgets why she was in his room, but it wasn’t to do this, so it doesn’t matter anymore. 

“I feel it,” he wets his lips with his tongue. “Sometimes. Just like anyone does.”

This is maybe the most damning confession of all.

She attempts to motion, but the arms at her chest have no mobility. “This helps?”

He nods, touching her hair, her lips, the stretch of delicate skin over her temple. It’s no secret it’s the most fragile part of her skull. That her former enemy touches her there-

She shivers. He couldn’t let that happen. But he already knows why she can and he can’t. 

She tips her head back, out of his hands, and falls to her back on the mattress. There’s not much else she can do without use of her hands. “I like the…the fear.”

“Always?” it would explain a few things.

She shakes her head. If only it were that simple.

“Now.”

He watches her chest rise and fall inside her leather harness, her restraints.  _His_ leather harness,  _his_ restraints on her. Her breath is labored. 

“I don’t just tie people up and look at them,” he responds with a dry tone, and she shuts her eyes and laughs. 

“Show me,” she plants her feet on the mattress, adjusting her hips. “Show me what you do.”


	9. swu: [meeting in secret]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: reylo + secret relationship

“You’ve never stayed in an inn before?”

Her knees pressed a curve into a well-worn mattress, though it was so old he had the urge to lift her off it with his mind just to see if her weight didn’t  _really_ affect the sinking at all. That it’d go on without her. 

He’d hardly call his previous travel accommodations as on the same level as this. 

“Never one this…rustic.”

His eyes flicker around the eaves of their room. His hands stay on his cowl. Not lowering it. Not letting it stay over his face. Half-revealed. She’s been here longer than he has, still in her traveling clothes. Her staff even rests against the bed, like she’s just resting on a bench during a hike.

She bounces slightly, looking around. She avoids the obvious. She fills the silence with talk of the unnecessary, because this was such a…such a risk, between them, meeting in person in a place set between missions. That a Supreme Leader could just  _‘shut himself in solitude’_  and sneak off to meet with his Jedi was nearly impossible, and yet-

 _“I’ve_  never stayed in one. But there’s hardly a place that has spare beds on Jakku. Hadn’t slept anywhere but my bunk, you know, I-”

He attempts to engage in the first real spar of the evening:

“It’s so strange, that you talk about everything except what’s really going on.”

He smirks at her, his thumb finding her lip so she quiets. It’s a practiced move, rehearsed in his mind because she gave him a head start of prattling on to calm her nerves, giving him ample to time to stare dumbly at her and calm his. Then two steps, a sarcastic smile, a thumb pressed to her bottom lip. 

They’ve touched like this only through their connection, through battle. And once from across a Galaxy. But the connection made for the necessity of  _this_ meeting. It was too hard to stay away anymore. 

Here she was,  _real,_  on the bed he paid for, and the poise of the movement-

Makes her laugh. A little snort against his hand. 

“What’s  _really_  going on?”

Her tone is a little defiant. Like it’s finally sunk in. That she can do anything she wants to him now, but he can also  _act back._  Instead of the glimmers she’s teased him with. They’re both here. She has to face the response she forces out of him.

He removes his glove, teeth biting the middle finger to peel the material off his hand. It’s a little more focused than practiced, his eyes on the ground, and that makes all the difference for her to relax. If he was the seductive type, licking his lips and raising his eyebrows at her, she’d have to leave. He’s already so  _princely_  about everything; so affected by the dingy room that she has no objection to and the place that was halfway enough for them to not get caught. This sense of his nerves, of needing to do something right, but without being able to _see her_  as he does it, is what makes the exposed bare hand the most erotic thing she’s ever seen. 

His thumb then moves from her lips to her throat. Then the hollow between two collarbones. 

“That I can-”

He swallows. He realizes it the same minute that he acts smug that she has yet to. She straightens her shoulders as his thumb slides down her sternum, her eyes closing as he catches the neckline on her wrap top. His tongue clicks as he swipes the pad of his thumb back upwards, trying to revisit the first time as it’s already passed. Because it didn’t feel real yet. Her lips are in her teeth, her hands balled in tight fists at her knees. Holding it all back. Waiting, even now, waiting, because that is less scary to her than the wait being over. 

_**Get out of my head-** _

He reels back to be so close to her in both ways, it’s too much-

She gave him more kindness than he deserved, just now. Talking to him like he was a person. Trying to know him. Now, insistent, he presses his thumb into the curve of her left breast, to the bone slightly under it, a rough press. It’s there he can feel her heartbeat, the tremble that connects her as it moves through all her limbs. He sighs. There’s so much clothing, daunting, and he doesn’t have time and neither does she, and he never really lets go that his saber is at his belt and he could end his most powerful adversary in an instant-

Her shaking hands untie the wrap at her waist. They then tentatively rest on his shoulders as she rises to her knees on what will be, tonight, their bed. It’s so real it has him shaking in his boots.

Their first kiss is stolen in an inn on a planet he’d never like to visit again. Their first night in a bed that disgusts him. With a person who is his enemy, but he gets over all of that to have this with her. 


	10. reylo monster week: demons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> demon!Rey/human!Ben

_“Hmm,”_  a hot breath rushes up his neck, “you used to straighten the place up for me first. Set the mood. Light some candles.”

This is hardly the shaky-handed worshipper that had called upon her like that once. All good manners and respect, following the dusty old tome by the letter to properly serve her. Ben barely stirs from his couch when a Goddess of the Other World  _deigns_  to appear at the Site of His Sacrifice. 

The Site being his apartment, seemingly messier every time he calls on her. His eyes are intent on her, though he doesn’t move, as he watches her thoughtfully waltz around his living room in a garment made of interlocking gold links that does not hide a single contour of her body. Mainly because it barely covers it. It shimmers under the dull, unromantic light either way. Her hair is wild around her horns, he hopes not because she was just with another worshipper…

He could hardly be jealous of a Mistress of Hell accepting the Rites made to her by all sorts of people.

She lifts his bloody palm into her clawed hands, a cruel smile on her face as she laps at the open cut that summoned her.

“I can hardly imagine you could  _still_  possess mortal enemies.” but her sharp teeth are revealed in her smile, “I am the first to say humanity was a mistake and if there were enough sacrifices to me these days to destroy you all, I would, but  _your_  swiftness to be brought to hate eventually might start implying you’re the problem, mortal.”

He shrugs off her words. She’s good at trapping him in them, and he wants a simple exchange tonight. Rubs his now-bloodless hand nervously up and down the leg of his pants.

“My neighbor,” he replies after a minute of pregnant eye contact. “Keeps playing really loud music.”

She crosses her arms over her chest.

“And?”

“And he…I saw him kick a cat once. Like, nudge it really roughly out of his way.”

“No.”

Ben straightens up, he does realize he’s slouching a wearing sweatpants. He did wear a suit the  _first time_  he summoned her. Maybe he had gotten a little too chill about summoning a demon. But the clothes came off either way, so did it really matter to her?  _“What?”_

Her expression is bored.

“Kill him yourself.”

He does not care one way or the other if the neighbor dies, but making deals with this succubus is the only thing that keeps her coming back. 

“I called you to make a bargain for-”

Her nails dance up his chest. Sharp. He loves when she rakes them across his skin. Even the feel of them through his shirt has him holding his breath. She’s unearthly, and hellfire has given her freckles. 

She grips his chin in her hand.

“You are truly, very casual about another thousand years of ceaseless torture and suffering under my hand. What is it now? Seven? Twelve thousand? That may pass in the span of a blink to me, but to you, pathetic mortal, but I don’t know what will be left of your soul after a few hours.”

“Rey,” he begs.

Not for mercy. 

She raises her eyebrows. “It’s been a long time, in my ageless years, since a mortal has amused me as you have. To break you would be a waste, but I’m not the one who offered you up. You did.”

“I’m not dead yet.”

“I am nothing if not patient, and you will die someday…”

He grabs her horns in desperate hands and tries to pull her in for a kiss. She bites his lip, hard enough to make him bleed, and he whimpers. 

“You do not do that. You do not control me.”

He licks the blood from his mouth. She glares at him. Guiltily, he stills his tongue so she can lap up the remains. 

“I know, mistress,” he murmurs against her lips.

“My time is precious. Make me an offer.”

“M-my soul,” he stutters out, “for yours.”

She laughs. “I already have your soul.”

“You will have a shell of it, once you’ve broken it. Let it have use to you. Give me a purpose at your side, and I will not disappoint you, Mistress.”

Her brow raises cautiously. 

“Serve me as one of the undead?”

She places her bare foot on his lap. Her bare legs will end him every time. His hands shake with an effort to not touch.

“It is still very forward of you to assume I would need you.”

“You’ve killed more than ten people for me. One just for under-tipping.”

“That was your eager puppy-dog eyes, mortal, nothing but pity. Do not claim I have affection for you.”

“But lust, you do have.”

His hands close over her hips. She’s flexible, he knows this well. A hand slides across the back of her leg, to the foot in his lap. He raises it, it lifts easily with her leg stretching to his mouth. It’s been lifted over his shoulder in more compromising positions. But even when her pleased expression melts the iron cruelty she masks herself with, her surprise is something he rarely sees like this.

He stares dutifully up at her. Kissing the arch of her foot like she’s his queen. Her toes flex near his ear. Pleased. Even as a demon, those feet don’t lie, when she likes it, they wriggle. 

The foot pulls away, plants itself next to his hips on the couch. She climbs into his lap. Her pointed teeth are gritted.

“Only until I get bored of you, mortal.”

He smiles. “You won’t.”

There’s burn-marks all over the ceiling above his bed to prove she hasn’t yet.

“Say goodbye to your future,” her voice grows guttural as her powers work glowing sigils in a swirl around them. He feels her dark magic fill him. There’s an sharp pain in his scalp, at the crown of his skull. She grabs him by his new black horns. They’re so sensitive, he bucks under her. No wonder she reacts so strongly when he touches them. “It’s mine now.”

 _“That,”_  he presses his brow with gratitude to her sternum, “is all I wanted, Mistress.”


	11. modern au: bad love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m playing a song that reminds me of my ex but the way you sing it makes me forget about them so easily” au
> 
> The song is "Drive Past My House" by Summer Camp.

“This has been a long, arduous year trapped in a terrible relationship, and I am not leaving until you smile.”

Rey clinked the tequila shot in her hand to the already-empty one in his. She sucked thirstily on a lime after hers, he had given up on those formalities and sucked them dry for about an hour now. Licking salt off his paint-splattered hands was a bad idea, and the one line he drew from her skin with his tongue was making his head swim more than the tequila.

She was good for the threat, but he didn’t want to be alone, so he felt he could forgo smiling altogether. 

“We should be celebrating,” she added, straightening the bun that kept getting knocked eschew by resting her head against his kitchen cabinets, “because I get my best friend back.”

His throat still seized from the strength of the drink, she had topped off his glass pretty steadily for the course of the evening. It had been a long day, for all of them. She had been the only one to come over and help Bazine move out. More for Ben than anything else. Bazine brought no one to aid in packing. That was a trap. Ben called Rey in for reinforcements; their break-up had gone this way about three times now, with Bazine leaving and coming back for her stuff and then them fucking on a pile of her folded clothes about twenty minutes after she was back in the apartment. This time, it had to end in separation, not mutual orgasm. So Rey was posted in the living room, trying not to incite world war three over sorting which records were staying and which were leaving. 

Now they sat on his kitchen floor while he moped, the apartment finally cleared of all evidence of her. Rey was draped in a peacock-printed scarf Bazine hadn’t wanted anymore, a trophy for the efforts of the day, and it probably cost more than the rest of her entire outfit including her shoes. Bazine was like that. It looked pretty against her faded overalls, but smelled like his ex. 

“Oh, before I forget,” she filled his silence easily, shivering in her bare feet as she trotted to the living room. “She was after this one, so I hid it. You got it signed before you started dating; it is not hers.  _The bitch.”_

She held up his signed  _Summer Camp_  album. Not the most valuable by far, but a favorite. It was bouncier garage band stuff, very 90′s, something he had turned Rey on to before he met Bazine. 

She’d get that it mattered. 

“From when she was pretending she was  _so grunge_  by dating you.”

“She always was,” he swallowed thickly, touched by the loyalty. He rubbed a hand over one eye. “I was a phase. I’m too fucking old to be a phase, Rey.”

She shook her head. “She’s too old to have phases. She has a fucking career, Ben, and so do you, her experimentation phase should be over. And what kind of Hot-Topic fake rebel bullshit is dating an  _established artist_  for a grunge phase. You’re successful, for fuck’s sake, more than she is.”

“Rey, it’s alright. We dated for too long. It never should have been this dramatic, but we couldn’t fight our way out.”

She shrugged, removing the disc from the case. He groaned as she slipped it into his stereo system. 

“Track 8,” he moaned pitifully, the tequila saturating his tongue, or maybe drying it out. She dutifully skipped ahead. 

 _Drive past my house, but it’s too late_  
_I’ll be a memory, a bit of history_  
_Disappeared a long time and now I’m free_

“We went to this show together.”

Rey settled on the ground next to him. 

“Traded in my birthday tickets for it.”

He lifted his sleepy lids. 

_“What?”_

“I had the dates right before it, swapped ‘em so you two could go. Remember? Right after Christmas?”

He shook his head dumbly. Rey  _had_  given them the tickets, but he didn’t know at her own expense. He just thought it was a nice thing she’d done because Bazine had talked to her about the album, one of three neutral topics his best friend and girlfriend could discuss together. 

He was not a neutral topic.

“You didn’t have to…if I knew, I would have taken you.”

At the time, he was so frantically avoiding another argument that he took them without a second thought when she offered them up.

She shrugged. “I’m not the girlfriend. I don’t get to decide what’s okay in your relationship, and if you were my date to a concert, she’d never let me see you again. With her jealousy issues…”

Rey sighed, feigning a relieved smile. “You’re free of that now.”

Rey had more respect for their relationship than Bazine ever had. Even more than he had for Rey’s last relationship; calling her at all hours to bitch about how unhappy he was, reeling her in and cutting her loose based on how well things were going with his new girlfriend. 

God, had he let himself fall into something so toxic? Just because  _she_ was dating someone  _he_  hated when Bazine showed up? Rey wasn’t even with Wexley anymore. Hadn’t been for months.

“Rey, you should never do that shit for me.”

She was twisting her tongue into her back teeth, picking some lime pulp out. “Bazine was bitching about what you were going to get her for Christmas. You were worried. I figured my gift was not having to hear about it anymore.”

She laid her head back on the cabinet behind her. He nervously touched the rug under the sink. Softly, her lips barely moving, she sang along:

 _I’m swimming upstream_  
_I’m running that hill_  
_I’m living your, living your dream_  
_I’m doing this for you_

He felt like shit, and it wasn’t over Bazine anymore. He had handed off his phone to Rey to block and delete her number before they started in on the tequila, but he didn’t want to call. 

She smiled sadly at him. There was more love in her eyes than he’d ever felt for his ex. He sat up, as if to prepare himself to properly listen. She laughed. Mentally, first thing in the morning, he was making it up to her for the tickets. 

He just wanted to listen to her sing all night. 

She did stay long after the first time she made him smile. 


	12. modern au: how to ask

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: “you’re the only friend who stuck by me for weeks/months ever since my break up and I don’t know I’m kinda falling for you”

“I just,” Rey blinks at the massive picture window they’re seated at. People come and go; all with their own baggage in the streets outside the cafe. “I can’t feel like anyone’s taking advantage of me. Not anymore.”

He nods, nervous to breech the topic. Mitaka had done a number on her. Enough to awaken what he wished were long-dead, caveman instincts to beat the shit out of him. 

When tears flickered in her eyes, like they do now, they rise up like bile in his throat. It’s like hulking out. He needs to smash something. 

Instead, he swipes a chunk of scone hanging off her saucer. She flicks his fingers as they retreat. He shrugs. 

Chocolate pecan. Heavenly. 

“What happens when you feel that way?”

“I shut down,” she shakes her head. There’s a quick, deep breath.

He nods, chewing. “Doesn’t mean you can’t find love.”

 _“Ben,”_  her expression is adorably dubious. As usual.

“I meant it,” he shrugs, breaking off a second piece of scone. “This is delicious, by the way, remind me to get this next time. But you can’t just give up faith because one guy was a bad boyfriend. At least statistically, you have to gather more research than that.”

“I’m going to _kill_ you,” she threatens through a constant laugh. “The last thing I need is to wander around with my arms open, asking to get hurt again.”

“Well, masochist, if you ask to get hurt, someone’s bound to deliver. Maybe ask to be worshipped as the goddess you know you are and it’ll start happening.”

Jesus. Is he a 1990′s Women’s Empowerment VHS? 

She’s giggling, and the tears are gone, and he’s glad, again, that he invested in her laughter over total fucking destruction like his impulses tell him to when they talk about her break-up. She pauses to tie her hair back in a scrunchy, her face knitted up in concentration.

“You think I’m a goddess?”

He looks down at his plate, but covers his blush with the fall of his hair and a careful laugh. He can’t watch her tie her hair up when the sunlight hits it like that. Because of different instincts. “I said  _you know you’re_  a goddess.”

“Huh,” she takes a thoughtful sip of tea.

“Worship me.”

He laughs again. 

“Now you’re getting the hang of it.”

“Ben. Worship me.”

“I’ve created a monster.”

“Ben,” finally, he looks up, gulping. Her eyes are intent on his, but not as forceful as her first two tries. 

He swallows. In all the months of talking about regret and emotional manipulation and fear of being vulnerable, Rey’s face was never this soft and open. She stares across the table at him, mug cupped in her lovely hands. 

“Worship me,” she whispers.

There’s a tremor, a stutter where his heart stops, and he can’t do anything but sit uselessly across the table of the cafe. 

“I already do,” he murmurs, and she lets out a little sigh. 

Her eyes close fondly as he strokes her hand across the table. Warmed from her hot tea. She squeezes when her fingers are in the right place to reach his. 

“When I call you at three in the morning, it’s not really because I’m having another meltdown, it’s because I need to hear your voice.”

It felt so much better to go to sleep after talking to her. Like he could roll over and put his arms around her. 

“That’s why I answer, because I need to hear yours too.”

“How long have you felt this way?”

“Not long. Just about any time you looked at me since we met.”

There’s a twitch sideways to her mouth, a little sad smile. That long.

“I won’t ask you to hurt me, Ben Solo.”

“I will, Rey. I want you to hurt me until there’s nothing left.”

“Now who’s the masochist,” she murmurs.

“No,” he steals another bite of scone. “I just worship you.”


	13. swu: wanted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: "Rey, what are you doing here?"

She shakes her head, silencing him. He can’t help the edgy, dubious expression with her here, just sitting on his bed, but he paces away to remove his cape and maybe make a new plan of attack. 

“What do you want?”

Her breathing is off. She just stares at him, examining. Sweaty. Only wearing light sleeping clothes. 

“I’m here to figure out the things that I want,” and her tone is so measured and quiet, he stills. No interference, not even a breath to cover the sound of her voice. “Is that how you figure it out? You try them?”

It’s too intriguing, beguiling, to resist. Even if his chest tightens, he’s here for her to try, not want, and if he were a better man he would put his foot down about that-

“You can still want things you’ve never had, you know.”

He’s trying to be alluring, but his own candor instead peppers in too much of his own wants, what are starting to migrate forever into needs.

She nods, shifting back on the mattress. “That’s the trouble, see,” she rakes her fingers into her loose hair. “I’ve only ever wanted things I’ve never had.”

“And you’ve never had the things you’ve wanted?”

She nods slowly, trying to grip his mind to slide it back into her context, the vulnerability is just so that it is dangerous, keeps threatening to cut them both. 

“What do you-” he licks his lips, pondering, “what are you trying to understand?”

She just lies back on his bed. It’s taken him a moment, but what she was just doing alone becomes abundantly clear. 

“And I‘m supposed to lunge at you, is that it?”

She shivers, staring at the ceiling. Slips her top over her head. 

That’s more like it, but only just slightly more. 

“If I come over there, you have to be sure that it’s what you want.”

“So we can figure it out,” she murmurs, her hand sliding under the hem of her loose sleeping pants, “while you stay over there.”

Jaw tight, he sits in a chair at the other side of the room. She keens as her fingers fill herself.

“You couldn’t do that alone?”

“If I want you to be a part of this…” her teeth are clenched, “I think I deserve a test.”

He force-pushes her own hand so her fingers twist deeper inside her body, and she cries out. 

“I’ll cheat.”

“I know you will,” she murmurs so softly. “That’s why I’m here.”

Her thighs squeeze around her hand. She must really enjoy that threat.

“So you like me, being a part of this?”

“So far.”

“Enough to try again, sometime?”

She’s rubbing furiously, her hips lifting off his bed. Another thick cry, her neck chording as it lets out. 

“I want you to-”

He prowls towards her, his face twisted in a perverse smile. She shudders, still working her own hand, eyes intent on her face like the image of him is helping. 

He kisses her bare ankle, draws her pants down her legs. Opens her knees. Watches her touch herself. 

“What do you want?”

She groans, fluttering around her fingers. “I want you to touch me.”

There’s something sick in him that always ruins a good thing. His own paranoia knows he will do that accidentally at some point, so he’d rather have the control to end it on his term. 

This perfect, wonderful thing is no exception. 

“So now you’ve figured out what you want.”

And he shuts his mind so she vanishes from the room.


	14. swu: awareness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: "I didn't know I was hurting you. I'm sorry."

He’s not good, but he’s… _better._

It’s the only way to describe it. He always seems to have occupied an awkward space, physically in the most striking way. 

His long limbs, wide torso. In something as sparse and minimalist as a First Order Base, he could stand up straight, sit alone and fill the space, not have to fumble past other people. It was not a touchy place, he could stand feet apart from whoever spoke to him. Keep a distance that was comfortable to him.

On a resistance base, with everything more frantic and alive, he does have to fold his steps back to let small female pilots race across his path to get somewhere more important. He does have to sit on low benches cramped with several different species of soldier with his knees sticking out. He does have to hunch his shoulders, restrict his gestures, be more thoughtful, so he doesn’t accidentally hurt someone. 

He is more aware. Maybe not good, but more aware. 

He and Rey watch each other cautiously from a distance. It pains her, not knowing what to say. She helped him get settled his first day, post-interrogation. Guiding him around like a fresh recruit, showing him the bunk he would be sharing with a stranger, the ‘freshers, and finally the room specifically for Jedi training. 

It was basically a support group run by Rey and the few people who could use their powers for small and separate things, but he’s shocked that a practice can house even three or four force users after the destruction of the Jedi Order. All learned through self-motivated study. They teach each other little gifts. 

But it is too fundamental for him, an advanced study, and bridging himself to his padawan days is too painful for all he had destroyed. Rey doesn’t press him to be a part of these classes. Doesn’t make him own up to the promises and threats he made her as a different man. 

Quietly lets him figure out who he is now, carefully watching, saying nothing.

It is odd, in a few incidents where she’d prove she do anything for him, yet both of them being too self-conscious to even say more than “Hello” when passing each other at random. 

He gets badly injured, during training, in a way that was too inept to be a real accident and had to have been an attempt to take him down permanently. 

The blaster “misfire” should have killed him. But she dropped everything to come to the medbay as a last-ditch effort to heal him. She put her whole self into it. He could feel it.

She was crying, he remembers that, when his breathing settles back to normal, his flesh knit together from herself given into him. 

She needs just as much sleep to heal herself. He asks she be kept close, just so he has the chance to thank her, and it’s granted more because it’s easier to keep her there at a neighboring bed than to move even one of them. There aren’t a lot of beds to begin with.

Her sleeping next to him helps dull some of the worst pain. No matter how it feels, she’s there. 

He listens to her breathe. So calm in her own body. So aware of it, smaller thing that she is, so sure. 

She’s good, in a way that he’s not. 

And he only…when he hadn’t been aware, he’d only tried to mold her into something like him. Hitting all her hurt places. Cutting open her old wounds. 

He feels her wake up, because he’s waiting for it, and she feels him too, at her side, and he listens to her breathe.

“I keep my distance because I think it’s what I deserve.”

There’s a loud inhale, shuddery, but she doesn’t answer yet. 

“I’m trying to. To be better than I was.”

“And what does that have to do with avoiding me?”

There’s a little bit of…pain there. That he had set the boundaries of being apart, unable to bridge that divide. 

Her eyes are on the ceiling. He hadn’t known…he had put so much pressure on her, before he turned, did she want anything to do with him after that? It felt imposing. 

“I have regrets about some of the things I’ve said to you.”

She swallows, her tongue darting between her lips. He keeps talking, his eyes still closed because his opened-and-then-sealed-shut stomach is still  _killing_ him. The entire wall of muscle is cramping from being…regrown, it would seem. After being blasted open, torn apart.

“That was the nature of pain, to me. That it was a tool. I’d seen how people use it to shape each other. It was my…I thought it was useful. That I was guiding you. Helping.” 

He is quiet as he looks at her. 

He had been trying to change her because he thought it kinder to make her touch. 

She was already tough. But she was good, even then, as she is now.

She’s smiling sadly at him. But the smile is an assurance, because she’s crying. She is trying to make it okay that she is crying over him.

He says the words, the first step forward after many made in retreat;

“I didn’t know I was hurting you. I’m sorry.”


	15. modern au: 3am self-care

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: “I’m knocking on your door 3am in the morning but you’re not my friend. But I need a beer and possibly a hug because my gf broke up with me?"

“….would a face mask make you feel better?” 

The green-faced girl blinks nervously up at him, the stuff smeared all over her face cracking slightly around the edges. He is so broken, he is shaking, but he finds himself nodding to whatever intonation her question has instead of the words she is saying. The question sounds like  _can I try to make you feel better?_ and he wants her to. Desperately. 

“Good,” nodding for a second. “Cuz that’s all I got.”

She lets him into her apartment. 

“You’re signed in as a guest for Phasma?”

High security apartment complex. Probably why she’s so chill just letting him in here. Or maybe it’s to shut him up.

Ben nods, walking blindly to her couch. She considers him as he flops down, eyes foggy with tears, and goes to her fridge. Pops open two beers. Her hands work as she texts before bringing both bottles to the coffee table. The phone casts her in a blue glow in a hazy yellow kitchen. 

He watches fish swim around a green, buzzing tank in her living room. She made a sweet little home for them. Even number, too, all paired off. 

He wants to be one of her fish.

“Just letting a friend know that, so there’s a paper trail if you decide to murder me.” She sits down next to him, smiles, then grimaces as the green face mask cracks more. “Can I was this shit off my face first? Then I’ll do yours.”

He barely nods, again, sort of preferring her tone to her words. 

“I’ve seen you coming and going with Phas,” she pokes her head out of her bathroom, faucet running with steaming water. There’s flecks of the dried mask in her hairline. She keeps dipping her head back inside the bathroom to wash her face, “she’s a tough nut to crack. She really threw you out without a chance to state your case?”

She’s heard the abridged version, slurred through his own pain when she opened the door tentatively to the sound of him crying.

“Just dumped me,” he murmurs into the glass mouth of his beer. “it was more…humiliating, really, than tragic.”

“Well, you’re the one getting all cozy for girl’s night in,” she points to the frozen image on her TV. Poppy, bright colors that no teenager actually wears. “Skincare and  _Ten Things I Hate About You._  Some self-love, if you will.”

Under the mask, she’s really pretty.

“Self-love for single people,” he murmurs, and she swings her head from out behind the bathroom doorframe with a scandalized expression. “Oh. Uh. Not like that.”

She chuckles, coming back with a squeeze-bottle of something. “Here. Your turn.”

She dips a warm washcloth to touch his brow, testing, and he rests his head back against the couch. There’s a groan when she covers his face with a steaming towel. 

“Divine, right?”

His crying-swollen sinuses have cleared. That in itself is a blessing. He feels born anew when she lifts the steam from his face. 

She then coats a thick layer of something minty across his skin. There’s a grit to it he doesn’t expect. This causes his features to wrinkle dubiously, but she laughs. “I know. It’s weird. You’re more receptive to this than I expected.”

“You seemed to think it would help. I’d try anything.”

He can see her up close now, bare-faced. Her skin is pink from the warm water, but freckles poke through. It looks so clean, and she smells like mint, and he wants to close his eyes and breathe her.

This is already more crazy and romantic than anything he felt for Phasma.

“I had no confidence,” but she laughs, bending close to even out the layer. Her so near to his face is…well…he’s pretty newly on the market, and he didn’t expect the doorway he went to go cry in would open to a nice girl in her skimpy pajamas inviting him in for romcoms and beauty routines. This is a whole mess of weird emotions. 

“Why are you doing the whole self-love, skincare, romcom thing in the middle fo the night?”

She shrugs. “Because…I deserve it.”

“Oh,” that sounds nice, to know that about yourself.

“You’re so…”

“What?” he takes a defensive sip of beer.

 _“Pretty,”_ she murmurs, but it’s like a girl at a sleepover, not a girl looking at a man alone in her apartment. He bites down resentment over that. “Like, I don’t think you need the mask, but that’s just…it was fun to put it on you. Fuss over you.”

He blurts out the first thing that comes to mind.

“Phasma was cheating on me.”

“Oh,” she swallows. “Oh man.  _Fuck._  I’m sorry.”

He twists his mouth to hide what he wants to say. “S’kay.”

It’s not, but whatever.

She shakes her head. 

“You want…” she looks frantically around the apartment. She moves her lips silently, and for a moment, he actually thinks she’s desperate enough to offer him  _her fish_  to make him feel better.  _“A hug?”_

Fuck yes. From her? Any day.

“Yeah.”

She leans close, wrapping her arms around his neck. He has to open his knees to let her stand between them. Her chest pressing into his. It feels good, but not in his obvious, pervy expectation. 

She just holds him for a minute. Until he feels less alone.

Their breathing syncs up. It calms his, like she gave him her current serenity and took his chaos.

“I’m Rey, by the way.”

He tentatively hugs back. Feeling silly for the mask drying on his face, plastering his stupefied features like petrified wood.

“Ben.”


	16. swu: [Supreme Leader Kylo]+[Sub Rey]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: "The only way you're getting off is on my thigh."

He wouldn’t love her so much if she didn’t fight dirty too sometimes. 

Her hand fisted in the hair on the nape of his neck, her other one curling tentatively over his shoulder. Her head tucks under his chin: a brilliant move because it can read as needy but also withholding from him the reaction he wanted to watch, even if he was busy. She was hiding in his body, when he was setting her up for shameless and exhibitionist, leaning back in his chair when she tried to lure him to bed and threatening that there was only one way she was getting what she wanted; because he had to get some work done. 

Rey straddled his thigh and hid in his body and played dirty, her thighs dragging her core up and down the length of his leg. Her sounds muffled in the fabric at his throat. Hands clinging. If she was going to use him, she was going to act like she was just  _borrowing_  him, scared to make a mess, instead of how fully they owned each other. As if she was shy. Could still be shy, with all the things they’d done to each other.

Clever, she was always clever about these things.

Absently, or at least feigned absently, his hand cupped her lower back to guide her movements. She purred, nuzzling up his neck to his ear, where her little, helpless squeaks as she got herself off could root in his brain and derail an entire evening’s worth of work. 

She was obeying, but still making him crazy, so it was easy for him to give her ass a little smack, to grab a cheek and fist another hand in her pajamas to then drag her purposefully up and down his leg. 

She set her weight down, grounding herself over the surprise and tightening her arms around his neck, right over his upper thigh. Seated. Not moving, but shuddering, her fingers weaving together at the back of his neck. He felt a flood of he arousal soak his trouser leg before she started up again. Focused. Not playing. 

“Good girl,” he murmurs, lifting his datapad carefully to try and look over what he was drafting. Once she lost his full attention, she climbed onto him, her legs scrambled for purchase, straddling his lap in his chair to continue her grinding. Her silky pajama bottoms were soaked through.

She remained over one thigh. Following the rules.

Never said she couldn’t climb in his lap, just that she had to use his thigh.

“I suppose you think you’re very clever,” he grumbled, tilting back in his chair and turned away from the show she was now putting on. Not enough to set down his work, even with her arched back and wild hair and muscular thighs riding. 

A hand snaked down to held her along, her own, disobeying, and he smacked again. Proving he was paying close attention. Drawing her hand away from her sex, extracting her from her improvisation. She glowered down at him, hips stilling, before stroking her hands over his torso. 

 _“Sir,”_  she purred, a rare use of the name when it wasn’t asked for. His fingers whitened on the edge of the screen, but he still pretended to read. She unfastened his shirt at the throat and stroked the bare skin of his neck. “I want to cum. I want to cum so bad.”

“I put you in charge of that, sweet thing.” he stroked up and down her spine lovingly, if absently, “you can do it.”

She shook her head, burrowing into his throat to hide a moan, and to suck on his skin. He arched uncomfortably against her, and felt a flash of teeth that was her devious grin. Those thighs worked over him, he felt a line of her wetness now soaking his thigh, and he was struggling not to give into this. But she had to learn to follow orders, there was no breaking. 

“So close, I can tell,” he encouraged, staring a screen that could have died minutes ago for all he could know now. “Sweet little thing. You’re going to do a good job for me, aren’t you?”

She clung to his arms, nodding. She’d softened to the idea, maybe he should have talked her through it to begin with. This was her receptive, obedient side, needing him to take control. Even if it meant giving her a job to do herself. 

“You can cum from just my thigh,” he teased, lifting his leg to put pressure on her swollen sex that had her howling. She gripped him tight, bleary-eyed, gasping. “Not a finger or tongue or cock touching you, just your own needy little pussy rubbing whatever it can get. What if I said a pillow? Or the leg of this chair? Would you still do it?”

This, this was getting in her head, and he could tell she liked it. She may have acted put out, but she did this anyway. 

She nodded, her lips in her teeth, shaking. Her hips dragged back and forth fluidly, having found her rhythm that worked, and increasing the pace swipe by swipe. 

“You’re so sweet,” he promised, brushing his thumb along her nose, and somehow that little attention, that affectionate touch had her limbs lock around his body as she shrieked and came. It was quick, and harsh, hardly the biggest climax he’d given her, but more meaningful that riding his thigh should have ever been. Just a rough shake of an orgasm, thighs quivering around his hips. Cries muffled into his shirt.

“I bet you feel powerful,” she mumbled, curled up in his arms as he read. Sated. Sleepy. “Big strong man at his desk, woman pleasuring herself on whatever she can get while you do important business.”

He laughed. “I bet you feel clever. Distracting me from the work I was trying to get done.”


	17. modern au: exes and killing spiders

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You keep calling me over to get rid of spiders from your apartment and I’m pretending I don’t know you’re not afraid of them at all because I miss you too."

“The thing looked poisonous. You should maybe wear gloves.”

“I’ve got it, Rey,” he mumbles, and she watches the muscles of his arm chord as he grips the rolled-up newspaper tightly. His wet hair curls around his neck from the downpour he experienced on the walk over to her building.

Rain or shine; it has been proven that he will still come over to kill spiders for her.

Her hero.

Ben slaps down the newspaper, startling the thing out from behind the desk. It skitters straight towards her. She doesn’t even flinch. Her bare toes don’t even curl into the floor.

He shoots her a pointed look over his shoulder, hunched in the tight space, and slaps the paper down. 

Boom. Done.

“Oh, gross,” she adds for good measure. It’s half-hearted at best.

His expression is dry and smug. She swallows, a heavy silence filling her room.

“Sorry for calling you over-”

“Who else is going to kill spiders for you?” and it’s meant affectionately. It doesn’t land that way.

They both grow somber and stare at the floor. 

“Well…thanks,” she says lamely, walking briskly across the hallway to her living room. 

He sighs before following. She’s straightening up the room. Not looking at him.

Normally, he’d just slip out, but the tension in the air makes him linger.

She’s dressed so nicely, with a black cotton dress that has a halter back that used to make him  _die_  over her shoulders. Kissing them, tracing freckles, cuddling her muscular back. 

There’s a lazy, French record playing next to the couch. A romantic Sunday afternoon with herself, Juliette Greco, and…

_“I hope you weren’t busy.”_

She’s clearing a plate to the kitchen. She lets the words rush out pathetically. Scampering around.

He  _was,_  but that hardly matters now. Not when he’s breathing the valuable air she is  _also_  breathing.

He’s about to smugly accuse her of the set-up; of her conniving ways and finally catching her setting the mood  _just_  enough that it seems obvious what her intentions for calling him over here were actually for.

Not for spiders. This has been an act between them for months.

That sweet, kind Ben doesn’t want her to feel scared in her big apartment all by herself with the gross creepy spiders…

He wages  _war_ with an ex like her, maybe for the first time in his life, and he finally feels like he won a battle. You don’t just walk away from Rey. You craft plans for attack, and he is so ready to take his victory in that she fucking misses him just as much as he misses her.

She’s twitchy and awkward, like she knows she’s been caught.

Then his eyes light on it. And freezes.

There’s two glasses of wine on the coffee table. And both have been drunk from. There was a second, half-eaten plate of food that she hasn’t cleared yet.

“Did you have someone over here?”

She scoops the dishes up in a panic. “Uh. Yeah. Just someone from class.”

His mouth goes dry.

“And they are  _also_  afraid of spiders?”

_Spiders_  has always been code; but never so much before now.

“Um,” she licks her lips. Breathing heavily. “Ben…”

“Rey.”

She just shakes her head. At a loss.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she says finally. She closes her eyes and clears up the remnants of her date, and the arrangement that was not in fact a romantic trap she’d crafted to win him back. 

“Why did you call me?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. The spider…”

He twists towards the door.

“Well, there’s going to be spiders, Rey. There’s always going to be spiders. So maybe you should focus on keeping people in your life who want to deal with them for you.  _Other_  people, you know.”

He shrugs on his jacket. What kind of idiot who is just coming over to kill a bug and run takes off his jacket?

_“Okay, it was a date.”_

She has never raised her voice at him. Even when breaking up with him. Not like this. Not in the angry, frantic,  _fighting_  way.

“It went kind of…badly,” the heels of her hands are over her eyes, “I couldn’t relax when she touched me. I couldn’t get out of my head. She left and I saw a spider and I just called you, okay?”

Juliette fills the apartment with a lazy drawl. That and the record crackling, it’s the only two sounds.

“It’s how this works now. I fucking…go to the garden to catch some, if I have to, if it means you come over. Because I don’t want this damn game to stop if this is all I get from you. I’d make it last forever if you promised to come back every time.”

He steps back towards her. Grabs the newspaper he had left on the counter, Turns it inside out to hide the dirty side covered in dead spider at the center. Taps the clean side on her cheek. 

She looks confused more than anything else.

“Spider,” he says, tapping once more to clarify.

She shivers. He slides the tube of paper down her throat. Taps it on her sternum.

“One there?” she husks, her eyes tearing up. 

He nods, stepping closer.

“Yeah.”

She taps her lips. “One here, too.”

“Oh, I see it.”

He bats the newspaper gently over her waiting mouth, then drops it on the floor. Gathers her face in his large hands. There’s tears slipping down her cheeks.

“I missed it,” he tells her gravely, “let me try again.”

His thumb swipes over her lips. He swears under his breath.

“He got away.”

“Well, get him,” she urges.

“When you weren’t looking, back in April,” he swallows. “I spilled a bunch of honey under your desk so you’d keep getting bugs.”

She laughs. 

“I didn’t clean it up, so you’d keep coming back.”

He takes off his jacket.


	18. swu: [obligatory "we have to keep you warm" naked cuddling]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: “I need to get you warm. listen, you’re gonna want to go to sleep, but I can’t let you do that, okay? just stay with me, stay with me—!"

_“I have never felt like this.”_

Rey sighs, her lips blue, and she doesn’t know if she means this cold or this in pain. It’s an odd thing to not know about yourself. 

“Just stay awake.”

She’s slung over his back as the wind whips her wet hair around their faces. Sleep sounds excellent right now, but he keeps pinching her legs until she jerks awake. 

“Listen to my voice. Don’t go to sleep, I know it’s tempting, Scavenger, but I will kill you before the cold does if you go to sleep.”

The wind is suddenly gone. A door closed behind them. She feels his shoulders sink with a sigh of relief.

He keeps carrying her through a space that feels too silent, too still, compared to the blizzard they just escaped. She’s half-asleep when he sets her down. 

Kylo Ren looms over her, swallowing as his eyes skate over her chattering teeth, white fingers, wet clothes. He grunts to himself, shaking his head, and grabs the fabric at her throat. 

“This isn’t what it looks like.”

He tears her shirt open in a clean motion. She yelps, but it’s not like she can be colder with it gone. It’s soaked with ice water, all of her wet, from stumbling into the frozen lake when the ice underneath her gave way.

She’s too numb to care when he slides her under a set of sheets. How long had he been carrying her? Where were they?

He’s…getting naked, as well, staring at her face, shrugging of his clothes like they’re on fire. He jumps under the covers with her, banding her tight in a vice grip, but it doesn’t make sense because the panic she has over the assault never finds the dreaded encounter of him inside her. 

He’s just holding her.

“Rey,” her eyelids are fluttering closed as he pleads with her. “Rey. Stay awake. Talk to me.”

“I don’t like talking to you. You were just trying to kill me.”

“Well now I’m trying to keep you alive,” he growls, tightening his arms. She’s starting to feel, a little bit,  _warmed_  by his presence. “Tell me about your speeder on Jakku. How did you ever get that thing to start?”

“Every morning, three smacks with a wrench. Left, right, slightly to the lower left at the hood, right above the controls. I would have to straddle the hood and lean over from the seat.”

Her teeth are chattering.

He grabs at his cowl and covers her wet hair with it, rubbing roughly. 

“Mhmm. Talk to me about the weather on Jakku.”

“Colder than you would expect,” and she shivers out a laugh. Giving in, she groans, pressing herself up against him without resisting. He is warm. He jumps when her skin touches his, but presses back insistently. She feels him shiver as the blankets underneath them start to lock in his body heat. It’s slow going, he’s given a lot to her. 

“Don’t sleep,” he commands, and it’s there; the press from his mind she has avoided for a long time. She grits her jaw and lets it fill her like a spout of hot water into a bath. So much warmer, he is giving her his warmth, his consciousness…

“You could toss me out of bed onto the floor right now and have this war be over, you know that.”

She cranes her head back to look at him.

He’s meticulously picking ice out of a loose strand of her brown hair. 

He shakes his head, running his hand up and down her spine, the other trying to tuck her fingers under his arm to burrow them somewhere warm. Anything that feels warm on him, she touches, not minding for the sake of her modesty when she’s been given an ice-bath on this kriffing planet. 

“Who would I be, without my enemy? What would I possibly do with myself?”

It’s almost said like a lullaby. 

She merely gives a brief purr in response, enjoying the encroaching warmth.

“Don’t go to sleep.”

“I’m not,” she mutters, white fingers gripping his shoulders. She presses her face into his neck. The absurdity of the statement, declared confidently and half-frozen, doesn’t escape her. “it just feels good.”


	19. modern au: post break-up insomnia [bedsharing again]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: “I literally can’t sleep alone anymore so I’ve shown up at your door in my pyjamas, can we have one more nap together, please?”

His insomnia had once plagued their shared bed.

Rey was sympathetic in the beginning, maybe more than he deserved. 

Thought  _herself_  the problem.

She rolled around the mattress every night like she was tunneling through the earth in her sleep, snored, talked at length while unconscious and then faded her words into nothing as she slumbered next to him. She was hardly an easy bedfellow in her own right, and she warned him  _at length_  when the prospect of sleepovers became a topic sneaking into the ends of their dates. When kissing on his couch had become too hard to break apart from, when there was a tempting bed just down the hall and they could stay together all night. 

Rey didn’t hide she was not the easiest person to sleep with, in the literal sense. 

And Ben…just didn’t sleep. 

It had been that way since he was a kid. The hours it took to fall asleep. Staring at the ceiling, stationary, letting anxiety and regret wash over him in intense waves to the point he hated himself for his inability to give himself rest from  _himself_ for once. A lot of people longed to go to bed. That was the place he was least relaxed. At war with himself. 

Night was never a blackout once he shut his eyes. Night was blue light, intense and mocking, and he was too awake to understand the comfort people took in it. To him it just felt like stillness and isolation would never end. Nothing was open. No one was there. It was like outside did not exist. 

He was hardly an extrovert; but he liked knowing it was there.

Rey was sympathetic. Jolting awake at a sigh from his side of the bed, or even a groan of frustration at 2am, 3am,  _4am;_  when he couldn’t take his thoughts anymore. Stresses and insecurities and someone so perfect lying at his side; oblivious. She’d wake up, blinking sleepily, and wrap her arms around him, or kiss him, or ask him to talk, or roll him over and try to fuck the frustration out of him until he rested limp on the mattress. 

He adored her efforts. Felt loved by them, safe. They made  _some_ difference. Not enough for him to call her a cure. 

The sex helped. But that could hardly be required from her every night. Not when she was tired. Not when he was such a mess in the first place.

Despite her disruptive nature in her own slumber; she was a light sleeper. She sensed his anxiety. She was as restless as he was, in the end. Waking up once an hour, pleading with a tired whine, “Baby, please tell me what’s bothering you.”

 _Deserving you_ seemed like a lot to throw at her at the crack of dawn.

“Just work stuff,” he’d mumble lamely, and she’d sigh, and spoon against his back and stroke his hair until he breathed steadily enough for her to believe him asleep. 

It was never that easy.

“Was I talking? Did I wake you?” she would blurt out in a panic when she felt his side of the mattress move; surrendering to instead watch TV in the other room when sleep wouldn’t come.

“No, you didn’t do anything wrong.” He’d pat her hip and leave anyway.

He didn’t know how much that bothered her until they split up.

The bed is not the place to hang their break up. The thoughts he had in their bed, with her so close, doubting to the point of outright betrayal; that is where their relationship ended. 

Rey comes back from the bathroom, her silhouette vanishing when she turns off the light. He sits on the edge of her bed, swallowing thickly. 

He has not slept since they ended things. 

He had not known things were getting better for him until they got much worse.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, because he was relieved once to not have to keep her up at night worrying anymore, and yet here he is now. Coming to her apartment after she already told him things were over. 

 _“I can’t sleep,”_  he had blurted out as she opened the door, squinting at the hallway light, as though she needed to hear the obvious.

He must have looked like a mess. Bruised under the eyes. Walking around in the clothes she knew he slept in. Sleepwalking, almost, if insomnia was a state of sleepwalking.

She let him in anyway, sat him on her bed, and now returns from rummaging around her bathroom.

“I got these from my therapist,” she says quietly, and there’s a rattle of pills. “I needed them after…”

She was not in therapy when they were together. He tries to tamp the guilt down in his stomach; but it’ll sit there and rise like a dragon over his bed every night as yet another thing to make him feel like shit. He hurt her that badly. He may fall madly in love again and have ten kids and the job of his dreams someday and he’ll still think about hurting Rey  _that much_  forty years from now, aching with self loathing.

“It’s just a Xanax, Ben,” she murmurs gently, “It helps me sometimes. You can take it here and sleep it off. I’ll take the couch.”

“No,” he pleads automatically, but his mouth opens and he takes her pill, drinking the water she gave him.

She looks confused. Because he did take it.

“No,” he repeats when he swallows.  _“Stay.”_

She ponders this for a moment. Touching his hair.

“Okay,” she sighs softly, climbing into bed. No resistance. “Come here.”

His limbs feel heavy when he makes his way up the mattress. Flops down. His sharp thoughts are cloudy, like the ground beneath a plane becoming obscured as it rises above the earth.

She touches his brow gently.

“Ben, please tell me you’re going to talk to someone. Maybe find something that’ll help. Promise me.”

He nods frantically, diving under her sheets, for the first time  _relieved_ to be in bed. She opens her arms. He doesn’t question, rests his head on her chest. 

She whimpers and cards her fingers into his hair. 

“I never felt like I was good enough when you were so uncomfortable around me.”

He groans, but the pill is thickening his tongue, and he wants to tell her so much but it’s slipping away fast. “It was always me. You were too good. It was me.”

“I missed you.”

“Missed you so much. Felt like I’d never sleep again.”

He does though, nearly instantly, and even after he wakes up he stays exactly where he was as he slept, rising and falling with her breath. She’s clearly awake.

They lie like that for a long time.


	20. Jedi/Smuggler AU

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Rey is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and let the past die, kill it if you have to." 😉😏

_“Ben!”_

Her whisper is, like everything else she does, fervent and warm. “You cannot be here. If Luke finds you-”

“Your days with the Jedi Order are over,” her handsome smuggler sprawls across her bed, his traveling clothes looking worn and wrinkled. She can’t imagine where he just came from, or how long he’d watched from outside her window before he climbed into her room. But that’s part of the romance. “Don’t tempt me; I might make you shout then.”

And get them  _so caught._

She hisses, climbing onto the mattress beside him in a hasty attempt to silence him. But bringing herself so close gets her caught in  _his_  trap.

He slides his hands under her robes, and she bites back a soft cry when he runs his fingers lovingly up and down her hips. 

He can feel her protest on her tongue, like always, that last time was  _the last time_ they do this. She has vows. He is never around long enough to make them worth breaking.

For more than a few hours, at least.

She tries to push him away as he presses his lips to her throat.

“When I am still in training, I belong to my master, and he has told me I have to avoid passion. Even a passion for  _speeders,_  Ben, he has forbidden, I can’t be here with you. I’m sorry.”

“Then why have a master? Why belong to anyone at all, but yourself? Then you could choose  _me._  We could leave this place. Go anywhere in the galaxy. Together.”

“Ben,” Rey sighs, looking distraught, but the city lights dance across her features when they break into a smile. She’s trying to slow him by talking, but the talking is the strongest seduction he has. The minute he’s allowed to tell her of his journey; she’s his again. They can spend all night in bed talking. 

It would be easier for her to kick him out if they just made love instead.

A little lacquer box floats towards her, nudging her shoulder until she extends a waiting palm for it to drop into.

His casual use of his powers is always a point of contention. He’s wasting them this way, in her opinion. 

_“Possession_  is forbidden,” she reminds him, popping open the lid and smiling at the carved charm on a leather chord he has picked up for her.

“Reminds me why I always hated the Jedi,” he muses as she lifts the chord to examine her present, “by all means, give it back then.”

“It’s mine,” she whispers, selfishly, and that rare selfishness glows like a flame to him. She likes the gift. She wants it.

Maybe someday can be compelled to want him.

“Are you saying you missed me?”

She’s lifting her hair off her neck to put the necklace on. 

“As much as I’m allowed,” she smiles sheepishly, already modeling her gift despite the lack of mirrors in the room. The black leather looks so pretty around her throat. 

“Liar.”

_“A little more,”_  she concedes, wrinkling her nose. “If you managed to miss me at all.”

He touches the charm. “I brought a present for you! That ought to count for something.”

“Hmm,” she nods at him, reaching for him affectionately. Her fingers tangle in his hair. They might just talk  _and_  make love. 

It’s been a while. Long enough to forget if last time really could be the last time.

**Author's Note:**

> Is there a drabble you want to see more of? Or a prompt you want to give me? Let me know at secretreylotrash on tumblr or follow me @secretreylo on twitter!


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